by Nick Craine
“No!” Moe turned to her. “What happened?”
With this, the therapy session was officially open. Moe’s two friends were left on their own to gnaw at one another other, while the rest of the room erupted into spontaneous confession, causing formerly untapped springs of sympathy to flow.
“Give me some money, will you Chel,” Elaine said.
“What? You’ve wrecked my life and now you’re going to rob me.”
“I haven’t wrecked your life. You’ve done a perfectly good job of that yourself. I left home in such a rush, I forgot my purse. I’m starving. C’mon, don’t be cheap, I’ll bring you back something from the cafeteria.”
Chellis sighed as he reached into his back pocket. “The rich get richer.”
When he retrieved the wallet, she said, “When did you get that?”
“Today.”
“You bought a new wallet? Never thought I’d see the day.”
“It’s not mine.”
“What do you mean it’s not yours?” The wallet was designer vintage, its leather smooth and rich as dark chocolate. “What have you been up to?”
“I haven’t been up to anything. Mostly I’ve been flat out, munching on foreign turf. There was this mix-up at the, er, store I stopped at on my trip and I ended up with some other guy’s wallet. Haven’t had a chance to return it . . . to . . . to . . . .”
Chellis had flipped the wallet open and was staring at the name on a platinum credit card that he’d nudged out of its slot. There were any number of them slotted and overlapping like the shimmering scales of a dragon.
“What?” said Elaine. “I can buy the whole cafeteria?”
Chellis clutched his chest. His luck, Elaine finally makes a minor quip and he’s in no shape to savour it. He was in the throes of his own cardiac event.
Bring in the clowns and the neurocardiologist.
Elaine leaned over and peeked at the card. He caught a reviving whiff of her standard perfume. Turpentine.
“No,” she said, confused. “No way. Where did you say you got this? I’m supposed to believe it was some sort of mix-up? This is one of your stupid, thoughtless gags, right?”
“If I ever find the asshole who did this . . . .” The Mafioso guy was taking a turn regaling the room with a sob story, telling the appalled group about his son’s recent skin graft and how the kid now couldn’t look at a bar of soap without breaking down and weeping.
“Richard Major? You just happen to have his wallet?” Elaine had heated up, her face gone blotchy. “That . . . that criminal.”
A young nurse pushed through the waiting room door, OR side, and said, not unsympathetically, “Ms. Hunt? Dr. Huh would like to speak with you. If you could please come this way.”
The room fell silent as Moe shakily got to her feet. She gave Chellis and Elaine a despairing glance, then turned and followed the nurse.
“Poor woman,” someone said.
“He’s a goner,” someone else muttered.
Chellis uttered not a word. He didn’t have to. His heart had developed a murmur and was saying something to him very softly but insistently, and he sure didn’t like what he was hearing.
12
Call of the Gastropod
OKAY, so it wasn’t the sleepover he had envisioned. But then, his whole life, given this opportunity to reflect upon it, wasn’t the one he’d envisioned, either. Does anyone get to have that, besides Vaughan and his ilk? Does anyone get to have the fully realized, king-size package complete with all the hedonistic perks? (Vaughan’s ilk, androidsouled and smooth-faced, grazing in the fields of plenty.) Tell me (Chellis was most eager for the answer to this burning question), what kind of husband, when his wife calls him late at night to say that she’s going to crash at her former boyfriend’s place, says (a lilting, pussywhipped falsetto the appropriate tone here), “Lovely sweetheart, glad you called. See you when you get home. Sleep tight.”
¡Hola!
“Isn’t he worried at all?” Chellis had needled Elaine, couldn’t let it drop.
“About what?”
“About, you know. You spending the night here. With me.”
“Why should he be?”
Chellis had been leaning against the door jamb of his room, watching Elaine strip the bed.
Watching with an accumulating combo of longing and irritation.
“Where’s your vacuum?” had been her follow-up question.
“Vacuum? You’re going to vacuum at this ungodly hour?”
“The mattress, yes. I’ve honestly never seen anything like it. You should send it to a natural history museum.”
“My, but you’re becoming quite the wit, aren’t you? Forget it, vacuum’s broken.”
“No it isn’t. You just don’t know how to turn it on.”
“Baby, I know how to turn it on.”
“Jesus, Chel, give it a rest.” She pushed past him to check out the broom closet. “And to answer your question, Vaughan trusts me. Completely. Anyway, he thinks you’re gay.”
“What! He thinks what?”
“Don’t tell me you’re homophobic?”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“Don’t be mad. Where are you going?”
“To clad myself in leather. Good night!”
Chellis was still sulking hours later. Not only that, but he had fallen prey to the evils of deep night, the cerebral succubi that queuedup, waiting their turn to sit on his head like an array of novelty toques. This, despite having slipped Uncle Bob protectively over his jammies. His security detail. Imperturbable and tough as a cowboy’s hide, Uncle Bob was all that remained of one of Rennie’s old lovers, a decent enough lunk who’d hung around longer than most. So precipitous had been his departure, though, that he’d abandoned his roughed-up biker jacket on the kitchen floor. (The switchblade slash on Bob’s left arm was of dubious provenance; the guy had not been overly valorous, to put it kindly.) Chellis had grown to like him, drawn by his surrogate father potential and his limp, but Rennie must have gotten fed up, or bored. Not that Chellis had it all figured at the time, a kid taking a kid’s-eye-view. A stockpile of booze had fuelled the relationship, and the fights, nothing out of the ordinary. Chellis had been well accustomed to the drinks ritual (a bit too) and the rising sound level of ardentia verba that followed. Thing was Rennie could hurl a plate like an Olympian and she never took any guff. For all their differences, Rennie and Elaine were very much alike: confident, determined, self-possessed. Whereas he was a soft blob quivering on a lumpy couch in the dead of night. Not to mention wide awake and staring down a rathole of loneliness. Did absolutely everyone have to leave him?
Hunt, mercifully, was hanging in. He was connected yet to life by the merest, most delicate thread, a twist-tie of fate precariously secured. While his sutured and intubated carcass lay in intensive care hooked up to a factory’s worth of machinery, Hunt himself, what really constituted the man, was stumbling through the underworld holding his wrecked heart in his hand like an extinguished lamp. Chellis felt his own heart racing and racing, trying to catch up, trying to reach his friend and lead him home.
And Mrs. Havlock, where in God’s name was she? Not out joyriding with Richard Major, he dearly hoped. For one thing, Chellis had the jerk’s licence. He supposed he would have to courier the wallet to him, which was a good excuse to call him first, do a little sleuthing à la Lazar, and do it better. He’d flipped quickly through it at the hospital, while restraining Elaine from beating it to mush with her clenched fist . . . that girl had some unresolved issues. Outside of the usual, there was nothing much in Dick’s wallet, other than the evidence of unlimited and undeserved wealth, plus a photo of Di in a string bikini that Chellis admittedly lingered over some.
“He married that whore?” had been Elaine’s only comment, before removing herself to another seat.
But Mrs. H? She wasn’t answering her phone, nor did she have the machine on. Normally, she’d let Chellis know if she was going to be away, t
ouring or at her place in TO. Especially if he was in research mode, and he did have information for her, something he was sure she would find extremely interesting. Hard won info, too, considering the cherub’s stone head some lunatic had beamed off his noggin. Who would do such a craven thing to an innocent, mildmannered tourist? Some cantankerous local, or a feral child, or some misguided assassin with a Neanderthal’s limited arsenal? Chellis couldn’t think of any reason why someone would want to hurt him. So why did he feel so twitchy and apprehensive? Doomy, doomish, doomed? Free-floating, all-purpose anxiety was nothing – one’s daily bread – but this was more insidious and particular. A specialty anxiety that made him want to compact himself into a furry ball and roll away.
Chellis wondered if he should be worried about that book clerk’s Mafioso dad? Nah, that had been nothing but loose talk. He was grateful nonetheless that Laney hadn’t begun badgering him about her soap’s test results while in the OR waiting room. Laney. Was she asleep? Deeply asleep? He could maybe . . . maybe very quietly slip into the bed beside her. For a little human comfort, that’s all. To bask in the warmth of her essence. This, he imagined, would come tearing off her like the flame from a blowtorch. If he were caught? Curtains for him. He’d be excommunicated, drawn and quartered, his skin tanned and turned into wallets of the very kind that Dick, and doubtless Vaughan, carried in their back pockets, snug against their taut, manly buttocks. See, see! He’d conjured up a pair of pampered and hairy male gluteals and it hadn’t done a thing for him.
He could sneak into the bedroom and simply gaze at her, wistfully, even if she were sawing logs, raw material for some dreaminvention, her mouth hanging open, fillings exposed (the sins of her low-income childhood), dribble on her chin. She’d certainly been making enough racket earlier, shortly after he’d stomped off in a snit.
“You renovating my room, or what?” he’d shouted through the door on his way to the bathroom. This provocation had resulted in no let-up of the noise. On the way back, he’d tried, “Having difficulty getting into your chastity belt?”
No response.
“Keep doing those Kegels,” was his parting piece of advice. “Yeah, sleep tight!”
Nothing.
Hell, he still loved her, didn’t matter what she didn’t say. After all, they had the very same fillings acquired from the very same cutrate, sadistic dentist. They had suffered together; they were as one.
“Doesn’t this remind you of old times?” he’d said even earlier, as they shared a post-OR beer in the kitchen before getting ready for bed.
Elaine had lightly touched his hand, saying, “Chel, our old times occurred mostly in your head. By the way, I have some salve at home if you’d like to try it on your temples, they look sore.”
“They are, they’re festering. But no thanks, and what was ‘mostly in my head’?”
“We’ve never even slept together.”
“We haven’t? I could have sworn that was you.”
“Not properly.”
“Properly? Silly me, I thought passionate was more the idea. Dirty even, but hey, I can do properly. I can be a perfect gentleman, if not Herr Perfecto himself.”
“Give up,” she’d said softly. “It’s not going to happen. You’re only hanging onto me because I’m the female equivalent of your biker jacket. Grow up, send that ratty old thing to the Goodwill. Find a girlfriend.”
The nerve!
As he lay dying. Practically. Fretting himself away to a nub, the star performer and central ingredient in an insomniac stew. Fidgeting, tossing and turning, worrying, generating enough cortisol in his system to fuel a whole army of deserters, he thought screw that. Grow up? It wasn’t that simple. He wasn’t that simple, despite evidence to the contrary whenever he opened his mouth. He had a serious and sensitive core that he kept private and shielded from mockers, naysayers and female impersonators like Elaine. If he had a Peter Pan complex he’d fly out the geezly window and bugger off. No . . . no buggering.
Chellis hugged himself, thereby burrowing deeper into Uncle Bob’s embrace. A soft, leathery warmth enveloped him. Dump Bob at the Goodwill? He’d rather have him grafted onto his body, and should do, just to spite her. He’d always wanted arms with zippers, some decent corporal hardware. Black is beautiful. Black and white, social progress. With the exception of Michael Jacket . . . Jacketson . . . ? Fuck it. His head throbbed. His whole body throbbed, but not in romance novel fashion. He entered her. Somehow that always makes the her in question sound like a concert hall. What’s worse than bad writing? Plenty. Child molesters. Mind molesters. Celebrities. Theocrats. Swell, he thought, ramp up the stress, precisely what I need. Let’s slaughter the sheep on their way over the fence, why don’t we? Estrogen in the drinking water, endless war, factory farming, species extinction, Clostridium difficile, Elaine difficile . . . .
Thus aggrieved and despairing, Chellis spiralled into a profound and peaceful sleep, unattended by menacing dreams, outside of a few ill-defined coalescences (with tails) that scurried up from his subconscious and fled out of his mouth, vanishing into the boundless dark.
“Sleep well?” Elaine asked.
“Not a wink.”
“Go on, I heard you snoring.”
“You were the one snoring. Can’t believe I still have a roof on the house. No wonder Vonnie was thrilled you were staying here.”
“He wasn’t ‘thrilled’. He was being mature, unlike someone else I could name.”
“That again? What if he has a girlfriend? A sexy little bit on the side. What if he spent the night with his minuscule grastropod buried in the old – ”
“Chellis! I’m warning you.” She had snatched up a fork and was aiming it at his forehead.
“Please, please.” He held up his hands. “No domestic violence, I’m healing. What would you like for breakfast?”
“What do you have?”
“Beer.”
“What else?”
“Salt.”
“Nev-er mind.” She jumped up from the table and headed toward the front door.
“Where are you going? You’re spurning my hospitality? As well as stealing the silverware?”
“It’s plastic.”
“So I exist on a much lower socio-economic rung than you. Don’t rub it in.”
“Chel, do me a favour and shut up. I’m going home. To have a nice hot shower.”
“I have indoor facilities.”
“Might as well be outdoors. Your bathroom’s disgusting.”
“Unfair. I cleaned the tub only the month before last. Pulled a whole hairdo out of the plughole, all black and slimy. Who knew I had a heavy metal rocker lodging in my drain? It did look remarkably like a shrunken head, the sort of trophy one might pin to one’s sash if one were an ancient Celt.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it, though? Research, my dear. So, when would you like me to pick you up?”
“I beg your pardon?”
“That’s my girl, beg for it. Wait, wait, don’t go . . . what time?”
“What time?”
“Hmm, let’s see. I can be ready in about five minutes. Once I’ve had breakfast.”
“A liquid breakfast.”
“You had your chance.”
“I can’t make it to the hospital until later. You take the first shift.”
“I will. Then I’ll pick you up and we’ll go for a drive.”
“You don’t say. Where?”
“Havlock House.”
“Get lost.”
“I’m serious, you have to come.”
“And why is that?”
She moved over to the kitchen counter, leaned up against it, and crossed her arms. Chellis hoped she wouldn’t get stuck to any spillage from days of yore, as then she’d be even less amenable than usual.
“I don’t want to go out there on my own. Something weird is going on. I think Mrs. H has vanished.”
“So? Happens to writers all the time.”
“A differ
ent kind of vanished. Also, someone’s trying to kill me.”
“No they’re not. You’re just being your neurotic self.”
“Me, neurotic? Hang on, did you hear that?” Chellis strained to listen.
“I did, yes. Someone’s knocking on your front door.”
“The killer.”
“Probably. Why don’t you go see?”
“In case I don’t return, I want you to know that I’m leaving you Uncle Bob here in my will.”
“Marvellous.”
He gave Bob a little tug, pulling him closer, then sauntered off to answer the door. No point in delaying the inevitable, but he didn’t want to blow his cool.
A police officer was standing on the front stoop with a chary look on his face and a wallet in his hand. More socializing with the fuzz, what was this?
“Sorry, officer, I don’t accept bribes,” Chellis said.
“Commendable. Wish I could say the same.”
“Ha.”
“I’m looking for a Mr. Chellis Beith. That you?”
“It is, everyman honorific and all.”
“Can you prove it?”
“Who else would answer the door wearing Ninja Turtle PJs?”
“No one over ten.” He handed Chellis the wallet. “Someone dropped this off at the shop.”
“Cowabunga. My lucky day, thanks.” He opened it up, counted the bills, primary numeracy all that was required where his finances were concerned. “Cash intact. I’m heartened, Good Samaritans still do exist. But you don’t usually do home delivery, do you?”
“Not usually. Had to come by anyway. Your neighbours have lodged a complaint against you.”
“That’s not very neighbourly. What for?”
“Harassment.”
“Harassment? What utter and complete molluscs. What did I do, make some style faux pas? Tie my shoelaces the wrong way?”
“You’re not wearing shoelaces.”
“No, otherwise I might hang myself.”
“Anyway, here. ” The cop reached into his pocket and yanked out the impossible-to-get-rid-of bar of soap, Laney’s only invention so far that was installed with boomerang genes (it was slightly curved, an overly-accommodating feature). He wrenched the bar off his leather glove with a ripping noise that sounded like an industrial-strength strip of velcro letting go. “Practical joker, eh? This stuff took a whacking great chunk of plaster off their wall, they showed me the hole. They’d only finished redoing it.”